


Is It Cold In The Water

by deripmaver



Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Bittersweet Ending, Canon-Typical Archive Warnings, Character Study, Childhood Trauma, Heavy Angst, M/M, Mentions of the Regent, Older Laurent, Past Child Abuse, Past Sexual Abuse, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma, it's just laurent musing on his trauma for 2.5k words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-18 04:48:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29112558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deripmaver/pseuds/deripmaver
Summary: It’s one sleepy winter morning when Laurent is forty that he wakes with the familiar sick, swooping feeling in his gut.
Relationships: Damen/Laurent (Captive Prince)
Comments: 13
Kudos: 112





	Is It Cold In The Water

**Author's Note:**

> I read A Little Life recently at it got me thinking about the continued impacts of trauma even as we get older, so I wrote out this little Laurent character study with it fresh on my mind. Apologies to any 40 year olds reading this, I know you're not actually that old slkdjhfglskdjh I just kind of thought Laurent might consider it that way bc of the specifics of his abuse. 
> 
> Not a whole lot happens, just Laurent musing with a little bit of sweet Lamen at the end. Still, I hope you enjoy it!!
> 
> Title is from a Sophie song (RIP Sophie ;_;)

It’s one sleepy winter morning when Laurent is forty that he wakes with the familiar sick, swooping feeling in his gut.

Familiar – no, that’s not quite right anymore, is it? As the years have trickled along, sometimes slow like honey poured over white bread, sometimes quick as a rushing stream full of leaping, speckled fish, the feeling has become faded – a colored cloth left underneath the bright, unrelenting sun.

It’s the feeling that comes after a nightmare – the imprint of a hand around his skinny arm that he knows belongs to his uncle, the scratch of beard against the back of his neck, the taste of – well.

Laurent brings his hand up to his throat and swallows thickly, still lying in the soft sheets of his shared bed, amazed and disgusted at the same time of how the scent, the taste can permeate his throat and nose like he’s living the moment all over again. Like he’s thirteen years old again, and uncle has just given his head a gentle pat (his scalp tingles with the touch) and left him alone for the night, to take deep gulps of water and quell the roiling in his gut, the nausea and the affection that wars so brutally against the terror, the chilling thought that what they’re doing is wrong and dirty that bubbles up only at moments like this.

His hands shake. Laurent pauses for a moment before extricating himself from the sheets and from Damen’s warm, well-muscled grip. Uncle never had arms so warm and dark and strong, though of course they’d seemed so much bigger when he was a child. In sleep, Damen makes a soft sound of contentment, and his hand curls childlike in front of his face into the empty spot Laurent once occupied.

He looks beautiful, Laurent thinks. Even in his state of rising panic, Laurent can appreciate Damen’s softness, just in the corners untouched by his still-firm muscles and sinewy skin still taut with pink licks of scars all along his back. He can appreciate the thick beard Damen has grown in his advancing age – wiry and curly and massaged lovingly with sandalwood oil every morning to keep the dark hairs soft and pliant against Laurent’s cheek when he goes in for a kiss.

It’s nothing like Uncle’s beard, scratchy and frightening in its undeniable “adultness,” as foreign to Laurent with his hairless chin and underarms as were the kisses, the rotting wetness of his tongue, oozing liquid like an animal decaying in the summer sun – and then what Uncle would eventually put in him instead.

And yet, a shudder passes through Laurent as he runs one trembling hand down Damen’s cheek, the soft tangle at his chin, and he has to pull it away before the inescapable _wrongness_ clamps down on him like a bear trap and severs his mind from his body, leaving him a whimpering mess like a beaten dog.

Laurent finds himself suddenly in their bathing chambers, the steam painting a pink flush on his cheeks, the color darkening in embarrassment as he realizes he cannot quite remember making his way there. It hasn’t been this bad in quite some time, most days his trauma tucked neatly into its little box, the handle rusting over and keeping the bubbling poison inside for months, even years at a time, now. He blinks, gripping the porcelain edge of his wash basin so tight his hands go white, clenched and pale like they were before they became puckered and callused with age, and that just makes the sick feeling in his stomach worse.

He splashes his face, running his hands vigorously over his cheeks, and the little tendrils of wet hair stick groundingly to his forehead.

It’s hard, on days like today – bad days, ugly days, remembering days – for him to look in the mirror. Laurent still believes, or at least a small part of him does, bright and unignorable as a splinter, that he was at his most beautiful at fifteen.

He’s forty, now. A full two decades older than he ever expected to live, and an age he’d never imagined his brother wouldn’treach. When Laurent looks, almost accidentally, into the steamy glass above the wash basin, the slight smattering of crows feet around his eyes look like pulsing, diseased veins – like the blood in them has soured and his entire face will soon go gangrenous. His cheeks have the hollow quality of a corpse, and his thin fingers look like mottled twigs even when encased in his many royal rings and bright stones.

They’re all old, now. Uncle has been dead twenty years, and so even his youngest victims – of which there were many – are nearing thirty. Laurent wonders if they feel the same way he does, sometimes – if they look at their stubbled cheeks and the lines in their foreheads and hate themselves with an intensity they worry will consume them entirely.

Over the years, Laurent had learned quickly how to identify some number of the boys who had been put in his uncle’s path, wittingly by their parents, or accidentally. At first it was the look in the eyes of the noblemen’s sons, dead and dulled like a piece of sea-glass, especially in those families Laurent knew had tried to curry favor with his uncle. It was an older boy, perhaps in his late teens, who refused to take pets or succumbed to fits of rage that simply could not be beaten out of him.

All over Vere, whenever Laurent traveled for politics or leisure, he listened to servants and nannies and kept his ears perked for those dead-eyed boys, and he’d try to speak to them privately about what his uncle had done. Sometimes they grew sullen and taciturn. Sometimes they cried, saying that they’d been so ashamed of it, that it hurt so badly, that he was the first person who had ever spoken to them about it – and then Laurent would feel shame for liking it when Uncle did it to him. For initiating it even, especially as it drew to a close.

Worst were the boys who grew cold and angry at his arrival, and he’d poke and prod at their exposed nerves until they exploded into a fit of screaming rage that he’d swore he’d come back for them, and then Laurent killed him. Worst, but then better in some ways, because these boys Laurent understood.

And then there were the whispered stories. A nobleman’s son who had slashed his wrists, hung himself in the stables, flung himself from the cliffs and no one could figure out why – and the paths his uncle took across Vere, and whether he’d passed through this part at any point. Laurent does not imagine his uncle was responsible for all of these suicides, but how many? Will he ever know?

The poor boys remain, to this day, the most difficult to identify. How many live on, beaten down by the little traumas and torments of poverty as he struggles to have the poorest feel the effects of his reforms, so that the trauma of their childhood abuse mingles like blood in the water with the trauma of hunger, of coercion, of adulthood rape? How many died, still in childhood, from starvation or treatable diseases?

Once some years ago Laurent had found himself disguised at a brothel, and one of the boys – men, this one likely older than him – had come up to him to solicit him for the night.

“How long have you been at this?” Laurent had asked – he’d been investigating the owner for child prostitution, and had felt compelled to do this himself. It was an uncomparable delight to reveal himself to those who would hurt children as the King of Vere, and watch them squirm and writhe like worms beneath his feet as they realized just who would be dolling out their execution sentences.

“A little while,” the man said evasively. He really was beautiful – golden brown hair, dark eyes surrounded by thick lashes and dull as the dust underneath Laurent’s feet. Tormented. Pained. Then, he’d winked and said, “I was good enough for the King of Vere, once. Can do you like I did him – make _you_ feel like royalty.”

Was it just a tagline to bring in more customers? If it were true, he surely was not talking about Laurent, which only left one option. The surprise of the admission – the question, the uncertainty, the visceral disgust – had left Laurent reeling. He’d bolted back to the palace without answering, where he’d screamed, and screamed, and screamed until Damen came in to rock him back into himself.

In some of Laurent’s worst moments, the ones that remind him how deeply rotten and reeking he is down into his core, he thinks of how plump Nicaise’s cheeks were when they pulled his head from the bag. They were still fat with childhood, and Laurent thinks of the purse of his lips – no longer pink as the blood had been drained from them, but lovely all the same. How lucky he had been, to die at the peak of his beauty.

He thinks of Aimeric, splayed out like a statue on the bed, pale and bloodless with his beautiful brown curls – just past his prime but still beautiful in death, even if he was a snake. Sometimes, Laurent imagines himself saying to Damen, _do you think Aimeric had the right idea?_

And then Damen will frown and say, _who’s Aimeric again_ , and Laurent will be reminded that he’s the only one who has committed the names and faces of all Uncle’s boys – all he’s aware of, at least – to memory. They’ve burrowed inside of him like maggots into a corpse, and there they will stay, wriggling beneath his skin, the dead and the tragically still living.

Will he really never be free of this? Will his life be endlessly tormented by his uncle’s memory, the hands on him, the humiliation of the things he did – that he agreed to do. That he eventually begged to do, only so Uncle wouldn’t leave him, and then Uncle had left him anyway, and all he could think of was the utter debasement he’d put himself through because he’d been to stupid to understand that he came with an expiration date. That he’d always come with an expiration date.

Laurent realizes he’s making an ugly little sound, and realizes a second later that he’s crying – that small, quiet cry he makes when he’s too angry to speak, the one he only started doing once he started to feel safe enough to show how _hurt_ he was that uncle had never loved him like he’d wanted him to. He splashes the cold water angrily, watching it splatter against the floor with an almost angry sound.

It’s been twenty years since Uncle died, twenty-seven since the first time Uncle raped him, and on days like today he feels as though he’s living out both of those moments simultaneously, over and over again. He wants to crawl out of his skin. He wants to finally, _finally_ be free of what happened to him. Will he die, still tasting his uncle’s mouth on his? Will it cling to the back of his throat like the sting of campfire smoke as he gasps out his last, miserable breaths?

There’s little to do on days like today – bad days – than wait for the feelings to retreat back inside him, for him to pretend he’s human and not a wounded animal with snapping teeth and wild-eyed terror. How can he live with himself, knowing everything that he’s done? The impossibility of it overwhelms him, a wave crashing over the shore, drowning him in sickening shame and humiliation and the tinny voice echoing in his ear, _yes uncle, I love you uncle_.

But he’d been alone! But uncle had murdered his father, and Damen his brother, and he’d been alone! How could he be blamed for seeking comfort in his uncle, his last living relative, for being helpless as his uncle twisted his affections against him, but it wasn’t – he’d been thirteen. Damen had been having sex at thirteen, hadn’t he? But-

He is simply too old for this, for these rehashed weaknesses, these back and forths. He is too old for it, and yet they keep happening, no matter how far behind him time stretches.

This time, Damen blinks awake at the movement at the edge of the bed, Laurent nestling back underneath the sheets and under his arms. He faces him this time, and when he runs his fingers through the soft curls of Damen’s beard, the musk of sandalwood from the day before perfumes out comfortingly.

His brown eyes are soft and gentle, crinkled handsomely at the corners. There is a streak of gray in his dark hair, a white line of a comet across a star-speckled sky, and it complements him magnificently. He looks the picture of the regal, experienced, peacetime king, whose people grow fat on bountiful harvests and honeyed sweets. Aged like the finest of wines, Laurent thinks.

“You get more beautiful every day,” Damen murmurs, the dreaminess of sleep still thick in his voice. “Have I ever told you that?”

Damen is uncannily good at knowing just what to say, even without prompting. While he is prone to hyperbole in his descriptions of Laurent’s beauty, it’s not of the simpering, ungenuine kind – he really does think Laurent beautiful, even at forty. Even with age crippling his body worse than any pain could.

Laurent opens his mouth to say something cheeky, but instead, what comes out is: “Do you think Aimeric had the right idea?”

Damen is quiet for so long, gaze serious and framed with his long, dark lashes, that Laurent wonders if he’d spoken aloud at all – and when he’s sure he had, he realizes Damen had remembered Aimeric after all. When he speaks again, the sleep is gone from his voice.

“Laurent,” Damen says carefully, as though approaching a spooked horse, “Is something wrong?”

It’s such a silly question. Laurent wonders if Damen can even begin to comprehend the complexity of his answer, as he rolls it over in his head, again and again. He rolls over so that his back faces Damen, suddenly ashamed at himself, feeling like a scolded child.

“It’s nothing,” Laurent manages, “Nevermind, Damen.”

Damen is quiet for a moment longer, and if Laurent looked back he knows he’d see than quietly contemplative look on his head, the one he uses when mulling over his most complicated decisions as king, as Laurent’s husband. Then, and Laurent is surprised by how expected this move is, Damen wraps his arm around Laurent’s shoulder and presses a kiss to the bare nape of Laurent’s neck, just where Damen knows he likes it.

“It’s a bad day.”

It’s not a question. It’s uncanny, Laurent thinks, how even at the beginning Damen could read him so easily. An earlier iteration of Laurent might have stiffened, might have snapped something, but Laurent is too old even for that.

“I wish,” Laurent says, “I could be free of him. That I knew how to make him stop hurting me. It’s been so, so many years, Damen.”

Damen takes Laurent’s trembling hand. He doesn’t say anything – what is there to say? Damen’s touch alone is enough to show Laurent he’s not as embarrassed of Laurent as Laurent is of himself. Laurent has seen, over the years, how Damen shrinks away from vile men like they’re bloody, diseased things – like the rags encasing a festering, infected wound. Damen holds him so close Laurent is sure that’s not the case with him.

He hopes that’s not the case with him.

“Damen,” Laurent says, pleadingly. “Please just keep holding me.”

Damen does, and for this sad, quiet moment, Laurent tries to feel comforted. If he can just bear this a little longer, hopefully tomorrow will be better.


End file.
